Effective Formative Assessment

What motivates you to do your best?

That is an impossibly complex question that begs many more questions about the specific context, task, and many other factors. But I can tell you that when it comes to teaching, one powerful motivator for me is Fear of Failure. There is no worse feeling than to walk in front of a room of 30 teenagers and fail to provide them with a valuable experience.

This summer, my Fear of Failure Index is high because I am preparing to teach a new class: an on-level 11th grade US history course.

And when my Fear of Failure Index is high, I become obsessed with unit planning, so I am as prepared as possible.

In the first unit of this course, I will teach students about the era of colonization and interactions among indigenous people, African-Americans, and Europeans. As I design the curriculum, there are many factors to consider. Today, I want to focus on one: my attempt to design formative assessments that produce clear data that reveal my students' language skills, literacy skills, and historical knowledge so that I know what each student needs from me next.

Take a look at the image, question, and answer choices below. They are taken from a social studies curriculum designed by New Visions for Public Schools, a New York-based organization that provides thoughtful social studies curriculum. (Note: The correct answer is in bold.)

Let's consider what knowledge and skills students need to answer this question correctly.

Let's start with vocabulary. Some words students may be unfamiliar with include: etching, settlement, and harbor.

Literacy Skills: Students need to understand what a claim is and what it means for an image to serve as evidence that supports a claim. They also need to be able to consider how each image may or may not support each of the four answer choices. 

Content Knowledge:
* Boston is a city located in New England, which was in the northern portion of the thirteen colonies
* The northern economy was predicated on small farms, shipbuilding and trade
* Virginia was a large colony in the Chesapeake region, part of the Southern colonies
* The Southern economy was a plantation-based economy in which wealthy landowners forced enslaved African-Americans to grow cash crops, such as tobacco

Language Knowledge
* To evaluate Answer Choice A, students need to know that a semicolon links two closely related independent clauses
* To evaluate Answer Choice D, students need to know that, in this case, a comma serves to separate the main clause from a dependent phrase

I could go on and on.

So here is my pop-quiz for you: Is this question a helpful formative assessment of students' knowledge and skills? In other words, let's imagine we give this question to Student A and they answer the question correctly. What does this tell us about students' content knowledge, language proficiency, and literacy skills?

Let's consider a few possibilities:
1. The student has mastered the skill of linking claims and evidence
2. The student possesses deep knowledge of the differences among colonial regions
3. The student has mastered the skill of linking claims and evidence AND possesses deep knowledge of the differences among colonial regions
4. The student has not mastered the skill of linking claims and evidence AND does not possess deep knowledge of the differences among colonial regions
5. We have almost no idea how well the student has mastered the skill of linking claims and evidence or the depth of their content knowledge.

My Answer: E. Because the assessment measures so many things all at once, it doesn't provide me with clear information about what my students can and cannot do. Therefore, a  student's answer to this question does not provide me with useful formative data that can help me decide what to do for them next. Furthermore, it is very difficult to backwards-plan my lessons to ensure that I teach students all of the vocabulary, knowledge and skills necessary to answer this question. This is especially the case if this question is asked as part of a much longer assessment that includes 20 or so similar questions. That is simply too much data for me to comb through, parse, and interpret and too many elements to incorporate into my curriculum.

So, what would a better formative assessment look like?

Here is an assessment I designed that covers the same historical content and a similar skill: the ability to determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source.

This prompt asks students to identify the central claim of the text, including how or why a historical process occurred as well as information from outside the text. It also asks students to begin their sentence with a subordinating conjunction. Let's look at some possible responses and what they might indicate about a students' skills.

I believe this task will give me much more useful information about my students' knowledge and skills. This is true for a few reasons:
* By making the outside knowledge component of the task explicit, I can more accurately diagnose whether students need support with knowledge, skills or both.
* Because the question requires students to write rather than simply select an answer, I will gain insight into their language needs. (i.e. Can they write complete sentences? Do they use subordinating conjunctions effectively?)
* By providing students with clear criteria for explicating the authors' claim, I can train them to do so in sophisticated ways and hold them to high standards
* The prompt is evergreen; it can be paired with a variety of grade-level texts related to my content. This means that I can teach this skill in exactly the same way that I will assess it.

What do you think? I'd love your feedback and to hear from you about how you design formative assessments and use the data to differentiate instruction for your students. 

And if you'd like my help, please email me. I'd love to work with you.

Sincerely,

Ben Katcher